Mayor James J. Fiorentini > Press Release

For Immediate Release: March 23, 2007

Mayor Calls for Specific School Committee Goals to Improve Student Performance

Mayor James J. Fiorentini today called upon the Haverhill School Committee to adopt specific goals to improve student MCAS scores and decrease the dropout rate. Fiorentini said that the School Committee goals must be straight forward and easy to understand. He said that the public need s a way to measure the Committee’s performance and hold the Committee accountable.

At Thursday night’s School Committee meeting, the Committee discussed it annual goals. Fiorentini said that the most important goal for us is to improve student performance in Haverhill.

“Student achievement should be the number one and most important goal of the School Committee. In order to do that, we need to make this our overarching goal. We also need to set specific performance standards—a minimum of a three-percent increase in MCAS scores in the upcoming year. We need to set specific standards so that the public knows we are meeting our goals and so that the public can hold us accountable if we do not.”

Similarly, we should hold ourselves to a three-percent decrease in the dropout rate. The time for talking about improvement and performance is over. The time to draw up plans and formulate a policy is done. The time for action is now.”

Fiorentini also said that the school principal contracts should be performance based and each school principal should be held to a three-percent performance increase in MCAS scores.

“Private industry has shown for decades that linking performance to pay is the best way to improve performance. We need to adopt those same private industry principles with our school administrators.”

During the school committee meeting and later on an e-mail to School Committee members, Fiorentini said that only by setting specific standards could the public be able to test whether the School Committee was meeting its goals: